ferne.io is an online platform where you can mark your travels on a world map, share your profile, and collect achievements. I love to travel, and I thought it would be fun to create such a platform to record my adventures.

Idea

I initially came up with this idea because I was already using some existing solutions for tracking my travels. However, I was unhappy with how convoluted these solutions were. I wanted something minimalistic, shareable and embeddable.

I chose the name "ferne" because in German "die Ferne" can be used to describe "the distance" or "the faraway places". It is also a play on the word Fernweh, which means "a longing for far-off places".

Goals

Besides the obvious goal of having a platform to mark my travels, I also wanted to: build a product from zero to production with Supabase. I think it is an amazing technology that allows you to ship products quickly. I had limit experience with it, but their docs are well-structured. They also have a generous free tier, which is great for small projects like this one.

Tech Stack

• Frontend: Typescript, Nextjs, tailwindcss, shadcn/ui, amcharts

• Backend: Supabase (PostgreSQL, Auth, Storage)

Key Features

These features were my must-haves for the first version of the platform:

• An interactive, 3D world map to mark your travels
• A profile page to share your travels (there for a user system)
• An embeddable widget to show your travels on other websites (so that I can use it in my own blog)

Some nice-to-have features:

• Travel stats (e.g. number of countries visited)
• Different types of world maps
• Some customizations on marking your travels
• Achievements
• Landmarks

Learnings

I learned a lot while building this project, especially about Supabase. This was my first time shipping a product with it, and I was impressed by how easy it was to set up the database, authentication, and storage. Their local development setup is also pretty good.

Through this project I got to know amcharts which is an extremely powerful charts & maps library. It did take a few trials and errors to get the map working the way I wanted, but in the end it was worth it.

Aftermath

I am still using ferne.io to mark my travels.